Five C1 cars released! TTR's TheBeast and Jaws from TDR, plus his red XA Falcon from MadMax2, heavily optimized (see previous posts). But also my old NewSuppressor port from TDR and a new TDR port: TheMachine!They are all full featured (but the damn cockpit frame ofcourse, I'm no Econo~ They have bonnet model though) and some use that new material (which I'm still supposed to explain etc).

I spent two days cleaning and preparing TTR's RedBat Rocky. It's not yet fully done as I need to reinstall MAX8 in order to use the render2texture tool to capture the smoothing groups on the texture (should have done that with the wastemaro as well...). So yeah it's almost like a 90% optimisation, from 13022 triangles to 1540. So yeah the three cars from TTR I wanted to port are now ready, I'll get them ingame then move on the next cars in my list: the New Suppressor and The Machine, both from TDR again. I had already ported the New Suppressor to C2, time for C1. The Machine is a pretty simple model geometry-wise but the overal design is nice IMO.

In other news, Chevy did the boulders again in the desert. Fucking awesome. Gotta REALLY watch out for them now!

I know that in the three cars, there are materials that seem to be only diffuse colors and actually they are! In PT2, I'll apply that new kind of Carmageddon material I talked about some posts below...

Some good news! First I'm done with my part of the job on the C2 desert. I made it evolve from a 10k triangles to a 160k tris environment, no need to tell you that you won't ever loose the control of your car because of the blocky terrain again! Smooth like hell. Let's all wish good luck and motivation to ChevyII who now has to replot all the powerups and noncars again, or at least place them correctly. There are a handful of them. Such as, a damn lot.

Now to the second good news, the first totaly new track for C1 (I think!) is born. I have a proof! Pic! Below! Now you ask me: why does it look a helluva lot better than in C2 while it is C1? Because C1 has no apparent texture size limit, so it was able to load (instantly!) 9x 1024*1024 textures + 1x 512*512 + 1x 256*256 + 1x 64*64. Most C1 tracks use like 50x~100x 64*64ish textures, the Hell uses 141. Well, a single 1024*1024 texture equals 256x 64*64 textures, you get the idea. C1 really is ressourceless in comparison to C2 from this point of view. On the other siden it's a lot more unstable, but that's another story. Here, enjoy pic etc, I have a like 500 noncars to plot for this thing then peds, powerups etc...

I'm currently working TTR's Wastemaro, and it is already ingame. I optimized it a lot too : from 4234 tris to 953 :)

It will probably be done quickly. But I took the time to experiment a new thing : integrate a SimpMat in the car's .mat file ! SimpleMaterials have specific attributes, like they are textureless solid colors, but still have lighting attributes. When you try to create a normal textureless material in PT2, the solid color appears ingame but whatever you set the lighting to be, it won't change ingame. Also the color won't appear in software mode (for C2, C1 is always software mode so it never works there!). The SimpMat is a solid color, without shadetab and taking the lighting attributes in count! Only problem is that it must be edited with an hex editor. PT2 always reset the SimpMat slot to a normal material slot.Here's what it looks like :0004 0000 0039 FFFF FFFF 0000 0000 3F4C CCCD 3F80 0000 40A0 0000 0005 3F80 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 3F80 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 E103 574D 524F 5F50 4950 2E4D 4154 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 00

See how the file type byte is different ? 04 instead of 3C. This trick can be used for both C1 and C2 I think. It works well in C1 already. I'll talk about it in a next post.

Besides the Wastemaro, here's what I'll probably put in C1 : JAWS (TDR), The Beast (TDR), The Machine (TDR), New Suppressor (TDR), Hawk MK3 and Eagle MK3a (based on the HawkMK3), TTR's RedBat, The Monster (TDR the movie), DeathProof Nova, The Interceptor (MadMax). They are all ideas. Most are just easy convertions, and I'd be stupid not to do it. For the rest, I'll see with the time I have and my motivation.

Another point is the difficulties I encountered while making the PIX files of Econo's soon to be released cars. He decided to use uncommon texture sizes (which is supposed to be ok, see my previous post analyzing the C1 PIX format) and thus asked me to create said PIX pack. Some sizes didn't work. For no apparent reason. I can't explain it, even though I found out what that lonely 8 byte was used for (ratio with comma). Oh well, the thing is, one can use fancy texture sizes, but be sure the ratio has no comma (or that width*height can be divided by 16).

The day has come for Birdy to rise and shine, for real. And the C1-style!

I made it based on that old Stainless Games artwork, but took the proportions (kinda) of a Cessna. That artwork was totaly off. I made the the model in MAX with 208 triangles, and the textures in Photoimpact, the pixelart way. And yeah it's me on the menu pics. Thanks to the betatesters ofcourse, Econobrick, Jeremiz and TTR~

The textures are 1X128*, 2X64* and 6X32*, here they are at 200% for you to see teH PiXaLz :

BIrdy is almost done, and actually if TTR wasn't there it would be already released. But thanks to TTR it will be better. :]It's a nice piece of lowpolyness, with quite effective pixelarty textures. It will end up in my portfolio heh.

In other news, I noticed the C1 APC actually has a bonnet for the cockpit view but it wasn't setup. So I did it. I made some more progress in the analysis of the pix pack format, about that lonely byte in the pixed data header : it seems to define 1/16th values, to fix the ratio when one of the dimension isn't even thus.I also have an idea to what might cause the damn non-sense crashes : unused parts in the model. Fleshovl, ED101's jet and The Sled have "unused" parts, I mean these are components that aren't merged with the master component even though no groove is applied on them. Fleshovl has that big exhaust, ED101 actually has two wings like that, and the Sled has those knifes on the wheels, they aren't merged with the wheel model as it is for Cleaver's wheels. And also these parts don't have a corresponding DAT file in the MODEL folder. But I doubt about that last bit, as a lot of other cars feature animated parts without them being put in the MODEL folder as well, must be verified though.

And finaly I'm still looking for an icon idea. I've already made two but both fail. There's another idea in my head. I'll give it a go a show them up on the blog next time.

Ah also, I'm fucking looking for MAC files. Those disappeared from the net! I've been able to install C1 on my iBook and merge the Splat Pack from my PC disk, but as I don't have the MAC executble of the Splat Pack, transparency doesn't work for example. I don't have access to 3dfx Glide and Rave either, the only site with these files is MacCarpocalypse but the archive has been formated through a PC so the MAC files are corrupted :( ... I really need them 'cause I want the Gourmet Pack to be available for Mac OSX too!

The one in the third reich is not enough. I want more of them! MORE BUGS!

So yeah a friend told me the Bugatti didn't work ingame, crashed the game directly. At that point I realized I never saw that car ingame and never played it. Gave it a try and indeed it crashed. Same thing for the Sled. I tried and searched everything I could imagine. It was just an error in the GroovyFunkRefs... That error seems to be in the original game directly (I'm working on a pack uh so things could have been screwed up but no, apparently it was original) and that might explain why both the Sled and the Bugatti were set so that they never appeared ingame. Ofcourse maybe it's just in our version 'cause it seems a bit too big for an error (especially as these cars were previewed at that time etc.). Anyway, they work now... almost. The Sled still crashes the game now and then, especially loaded as an opponent. 2 other cars do the exact same thing : my ED101 and my Fleshovl. It seems to be a texture problem but it's almost nonsense. I can't seem to isolate the problem at all.

I had already noticed while making a cockpit picture that the game didn't seem to like some "arrangments" of pixels (in this case, I was trying to diffuse black pixels to soften an edge with a transparent area, it crashed the game all the time untill I removed these diffused parts). So is it the same problem ? I don't know! The Sled's textures are nothing detail-wise in comparison to ED101 or Fleshovl for example. Also the error is not systematic at all : the game can crash when you hit something with said car... or not! and the game can also crash if the car appears as an opponent... or not!! One could even see the three cars in a single race without crashing ! Nonsense damnit !

Anyway, I have an idea (ofcourse) but with all this nonsense I have few hopes.

In other news I'm working on a C1 Birdy (very lowpoly + pixelart textures), then will follow TTR's Wastemaro and his TDR convertions JAWS and THE BEAST. I'll probably turn the Hawk Mk3 into an Eagle Mk1.5 (as seen in one of the C2 artworks) after all that.

[EDIT] Even more nonsense! The Sled and Bugatti work on my other comp even though that GroovyFunkRefs error is still there !